Summary

Motivation: Past sea level fluctuations have shaped island area and archipelago configuration. The availability of global high resolution data on bathymetry and past sea levels allows reconstruction of island paleogeography. Studies on the role of paleo-area often only consider the last glacial maximum, which neglects the dynamics of island fusion and fission resulting from cyclic sea level fluctuations over the Quaternary. Currently, no global database is available to test the role of changing island geographies driven by Quaternary sea level change on evolutionary, ecological, and archaeological patterns. However, data on island paleo environments is crucial for understanding insular biodiversity distributions and human settlement patterns. Here, we present the Paleo Islands and Archipelago Configuration (PIAC) database, containing sea level driven paleogeography changes over the late Quaternary of 178 islands in 27 archipelagos, and discuss its relevance, limitations and uncertainties. The R functions developed to calculate archipelago configuration and island paleo-area are provided to allow calculations for other islands, time steps, sea-level curves, and higher spatiotemporal resolutions.

Main types of variable contained: Polygon shapefiles with archipelago configuration and tables with paleo-area per island.